book excerpt

The Conspiracist Manual That Influenced a Generation of Rappers

Behold a Pale Horse, by Milton William Cooper. Photo: Hannah Whitaker for New York Magazine

Milton William "Neb" Cooper (1943–2001), while largely unknown in the hated mainstream media, was the near important "conspiracy" writer and thinker of his fourth dimension. Chances are individuals like Alex Jones, QAnon, and even Donald Trump would not accept manifested the way they have without the influence of Bill Cooper and his volume Behold a Pale Horse, which, 27 years later it was first published in 1991, remains the primer of the new American paranoid catechism.

Cooper's life, from his military machine service equally a riverboat captain in the Vietnam War through intense exploration of the "fringe" culture of UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the Knights Templar, radical patriot militias, and the 9/11 Truth movement, concluded the only mode it could have. In November 2001, every bit he predicted on his shortwave-radio show, "The Hour of the Time," Cooper was shot dead in a gunfight with police force on the doorstep of his hilltop habitation in eastern Arizona. Long earlier that, however, the influence of Cooper'southward work had extended to unexpected places similar Harlem and the New York housing projects that gave nascence to hip-hop.

Present you lot tin buy a copy of Behold a Stake Horse from Walmart for $17.34 with ii-solar day shipping. But if you want to know how Bill Cooper'southward book came to Harlem, the fastest way is yet the A train to 125th Street. From there, walk due east to between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards, which is where, if he'southward in the mood, you can detect Bro. Nova at his sidewalk tabular array across from the world-famous Apollo Theater.

All varieties of items tin can be bought from street vendors on 125th Street: vats of sheaf butter, aphrodisiac tinctures, copies of old Bruce Lee and Pam Grier movies, $12 Louis Vuitton pocketbooks made in Shenzhen. Simply fifty-fifty though he's spent more than half his life every bit a 125th Street merchant, Bro. Nova, a tall and sleek man at present in what looks to exist his early on 40s, has always stuck with books.

It is a thing of continuity, Nova said. That was because, no affair how much they gentrify the neighborhood, "In the Beginning, there was the Give-and-take, and long after all this shit has been washed to the sea, at that place will still exist the Word."

Among the virtually historic of Harlem booksellers was Lewis Michaux, who for twoscore years ran what he called the "House of Mutual Sense, Habitation of Proper Propaganda" at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Michaux's bookstore claimed to contain nada less than "the world history on 2,000,000,000 (two billion) Africans and non white peoples." Hot-selling volumes were touted with ads reading, "The God Dam White Man is the championship of this Book. Read it!"

Bro. Nova and his fellow merchants bear on the tradition. On their tables are the classics, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, a hard-boiled Donald Goines. Beside these are dog-eared tomes similar Yurugu: An African Centered Critique of European Cultural Idea and Beliefs, by Marimba Ani, and Are Caucasians Edomites?, by Dr. Malachi Z. York, founder of the Nuwaubian Nation, who is currently serving a 135-year judgement in the Feds' Florence, Colorado, supermax. It might seem a reach to find Behold a Pale Horse in this company, but Bro. Nova and his friends have done a brisk business with Cooper'south book for decades.

Seventeen years later his demise, Bill Cooper retains considerable proper noun recognition on 125th Street. Mention of him and/or Behold a Pale Horse rang a bong with a surprisingly loftier number of people of a certain historic period who identified themselves as longtime Harlem residents.

"Near people, anyone who once thought of themselves as radical in whatever fashion, knows William Cooper," said i dapper-looking man standing under the marquee of the Apollo. "Behold a Pale Horse, we used to only call it 'The Book.' " Others recalled talks given by the late Steve Cokely, an African-American independent researcher–street speaker who occasionally referenced Cooper. In the middle of a presentation on topics like Cointelpro, Cokely would pick up a copy of Behold a Stake Horse and say, "Allow'south see what the white boy has to say nearly this."

Even so one of the near-shoplifted books in Barnes & Noble history, the popularity of Behold a Pale Horse began in prison, places similar Attica, Clinton/Dannemora, Green Haven, and Sing Sing, where Cooper's extreme paranoid view made complete sense. Besides, as Bro. Nova said, "Where else were people going to read it? Back and so everyone was in jail. Or dead."

This had the ring of truth. In 1990 and 1991, 5,077 people were murdered in New York, by far the highest two-year total in city history. It was the crack plague, and a new generation of griots arose to speak truth to the ongoing trauma of urban life. Many of the rappers who emerged during the early 1990s, the smashing Wu-Tangs, the formidable Nas of the Queensbridge Houses, were securely influenced by the Five Percenters, a.k.a. the Nation of Gods and Earths. The movement had been founded in the late 1960s by Clarence Edward Smith, a.chiliad.a. Clarence 13X, and somewhen "Begetter Allah." Kicked out of Elijah Muhammad'south Nation of Islam for heresy and gambling, Father Allah said it was necessary for black men and women to become "lyrical assassins." The tongue was "the sword," Father Allah said, and when properly sharpened, it could "take more heads with the word than any army with car guns could always do."

Clockwise from top left: Nas, ODB, Tupak, Busta Rhymes, Rakim, RZA, and Prodigy. Photo: Getty Images

For many lyrical assassins, Bill Cooper'southward Behold a Pale Horse became a key text. Rappers who take mentioned Cooper or his book include the Wu-Tang Association, Large Daddy Kane, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, Talib Kweli, Nas, Rakim, Poor Righteous Teachers, Gang Starr, Goodie Mob, Suicideboys, Boogiemonsters, Wise Intelligent, Public Enemy, Miz MAF, Aslan, Lord Allah, Ras Kass, and the Lost Children of Babylon, who told their listeners to set to meet your fate "like William Cooper … when the tempest troopers breach your gate."

The central to Cooper's appeal, said Ol' Dirty Bounder, he of blessed memory and court jester of the Wu-Tang Association's early Behold a Stake Equus caballus adapters. "Everybody gets fucked," ODB told me when we spoke in 2004. "William Cooper tells you who's fucking you lot … when you're someone like me, that's valuable information."

One of Cooper's biggest acolytes was the late Prodigy, who along with Kejuan Muchita, a.k.a. Havoc, made up the classic NYC hip-hop duo Mobb Deep. Once I asked Prodigy if it was truthful, as he'd said on a rap website, that he had read the 500-page, densely typed Behold a Pale Horse four times. "No. That's a misquote," the rapper replied. "I read information technology six times. I needed to get that shit right and exact before I went out in that location.

"William Cooper wrote what anybody kind of knew," Prodigy said. For many in the black community, it was common knowledge that the CIA was bringing dope into the ghetto to further enslave the people. What was the large surprise that, every bit Cooper claimed, AIDS had been whipped up in a examination tube at Fort Detrick (abode to MKUltra) equally a plan to wipe out Africa? The fact that Cooper was a former naval intelligence officer, a big fatty white guy who lived in Arizona, just made it all the more believable.

It was Prodigy who helped bring Cooper's message of widespread mind command to the larger hip-hop audience. He did it in a single poetry, in the 1995 video for the remix of LL Absurd J'south "I Shot Ya." Filmed in dramatic black and white, the rapper stands in an alley and lets out the 411 of the perpetually harassed.

"The Illuminati wants my listen, soul, and my trunk," Prodigy rapped. "Secret societies trying to keep their eye on me." As many hip-hop listeners attest, this was the offset fourth dimension they'd ever heard of the Illuminati, the malign presence allegedly behind and so much of what was incorrect with the globe. Subsequently Jay-Z picked up the phrase in his 1996 album Reasonable Doubt , the meme predictably blew up. Just, as Prodigy told me, the get-go identify he saw the discussion Illuminati was in Behold a Pale Horse.

If Prodigy began the get-go generation of Cooper-influenced rappers, Andrew Kissel, a Newark, New Jersey, MC who performs under the name William Cooper, was the offset of the side by side.

The William Cooper reference kept coming up in Google searches. The first item that jumped out was a YouTube "Cooper" made for his 2009 debut album, Beware of the Pale Horse. Entitled "American Gangsters," the video begins with a menacing plinking of a child's music box. Then, set up against an epitome of spinous wire twisted into the pattern of a double helix, the vocalisation of William Cooper arrives with an all-inclusive j'charge. "The CIA wants my Deoxyribonucleic acid wiped off the planet!

"nine/xi terrorism," the rapper declares. "The secret government planning / Gave birth to the recession / Now the world's in a panic / Another amber alarm got the sheeple running frantic." Shouting out an RIP to his namesake ("Residue in peace, William Cooper!"), the rapper says he and his crew are on top of the plot, "the puppet masters pulling strings for the microchip future."

William Cooper turned out to be an interior-lineman-size white guy in his middle 30s, wearing a long xanthous T-shirt over knee-length cutoff jeans, who'd been raised in a lower-middle-class family in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Originally he rapped as office of a duo, Booth and Ozwald. "We wanted money, dead presidents; we figured that was the best way to go them," William Cooper said. Information technology wasn't until 2005 that Killah Priest, an esteemed member of the Wu-Tang extended family, suggested he change his stage name to William Cooper.

"Priest said, you should exist William Cooper," Kissel recalled. "I didn't know what he was talking about. I never heard of William Cooper. Priest said, 'Go to the bookstore, get a copy of Behold a Stake Horse, read information technology, and come back and tell me if I'm right or wrong.' "

Kissel read through Behold a Pale Equus caballus with interest. In that location was some crazy stuff in in that location, nutty ideas about UFOs, only a lot of it made sense. Something wasn't right in the land, people weren't as free as they thought they were and deserved to be.

So Andrew Kissel told Killah Priest, yeah, okay, he'd be William Cooper. Ten years later, even his mother calls him Cooper. As for Bill Cooper, he'due south chosen "Milton William Cooper" so no ane gets mixed up. Information technology was a lot better than naming yourself afterward some drug dealer similar Noreaga or Rick Ross, Kissel thought.

"He was a patriot," Kissel said of William Cooper. "I like that, because I am a patriot likewise. I am a proud American. This country was supposed to take been congenital to question authority, to concur the people in power accountable. Non to bite your tongue."

A few months later, William Cooper gave a listening party for his new album, God's Will, at New York's Quad Studios. Information technology was a famous spot. Tupac got shot in that location in 1994. The Quad also offers a boffo view of Times Square from its 10th-floor window. On this item night, the tourist hubbub was interrupted. Information technology was a few nights later on Freddie Grayness had been killed riding in the back of a Baltimore police van. Protesters were downwardly there, duking it out with the NYPD. Watching the confrontation from above, William Cooper said information technology was "an omen," a possible sign of things to come, but unlike his clairvoyant muse, William Cooper was not nearly to predict what those things might be.

*This article appears in the August xx, 2018, event of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

The Conspiracist Book That Influenced a Generation of Rap